"The conflict between Banshee and Canonical over what should be done with Banshee's Amazon Store revenue stream, while it was finally resolved, was not Ubuntu's most shining moment. At the matter's conclusion, Banshee developers were not happy with the results. This is not how open-source communities should work together and no one knows that better than Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, who wrote, "We made some mistakes in our handling of the discussion around revenue share with the Banshee team.""

CentOS is RHEL-the-free-version, binary identical. RHEL is free-software and open-source, except for trademarks of some software; it just doesn't let you use its repository servers.

Canonical doesn't really make sense with the comparisons it makes with commercial Linux distributions. RHEL is really the only one that has any measure of success. SuSE is dying slowly. Probably the most popular commercial distribution is Debian, due to the myriad support services for it.

If you are going to pay for support, you might as well run Debian. You will have more choices among support services over running Ubuntu, which is not as rock hard stable as Debian anyways (though it updates itself 4x as quick).